A goal of Warlords is to tone down the raw thoroughput of heals. Players will not always be at 100% health, creatures will be stronger, and better gear will not cause scaling to spiral out of control.

The number of instant-cast heals is being reduced, a list of spells being changed is given in the blog.

Damage-absorption abilities are being toned down, as they can take the place of direct healing if they are too strong.

The healing from auto-targeted or passive heals will be greatly reduced and slightly less smart to make the healing experience more interactive.

Low-throughput, low-mana-cost heals like Nourish and Holy light are being removed, since they don't really add depth to gameplay.

Multi-target heals will be less mana-efficient to strike a better balance between single and multi target healing.

Base mana regen is increased a great deal at an early gear level.

Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue will hopefully be reduced to 0%, and PvP spike damage will be reduced as well by lowering Critical Damage and Critical Heals to 150% of their normal effect.

Click the cut to read the blog!

Blizzard

Last week, we talked about squishing stats and pruning unnecessary complexity as part of our ongoing design goals for World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor. This time, we'll look at a few topics all related to one vital element: health.

Player Health and Resilience

In the next expansion, we're planning several interconnected changes designed to provide better-tuned gameplay for healers and improve the healing dynamic in PvP.

The high amount of base Resilience and Regole PvP Attivate in Mists of Pandaria currently causes characters to feel much weaker in PvP than they do in PvE. To address this disparity, we're approaching Warlords of Draenor with the goal of shrinking that gap as much as possible. To reduce dependence on Resilience, we needed to increase player survivability against other players, and we chose to do this by essentially doubling (post-squish) player health.On its own, that increase in health would make players more survivable in the world at large, so we're also increasing creature damage and the effectiveness of healing spells to balance things out. The net result of these changes is that individual attacks will knock a smaller chunk off of a player's health pool in PvP, but your survivability in PvE won't be affected.

Doubling player health gave us room to reduce Resilience and Regole PvP Attivate, but our goal was to be able to remove them entirely. In order to achieve that, we're also reducing PvP spike damage across the board by lowering Critical Damage and Critical Heals to 150% of their normal effect (down from 200%).

Our hope is that these changes allow us to reduce Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue to 0%. It's possible that we'll still find a need for some minor amount of Base Resilience and/or Regole PvP Attivate, and we'll be testing these changes extensively and adjusting as needed.

Retuning Healing Spells

One of our goals for healing in Warlords of Draenor is to tone down the raw throughput of healers relative to the size of player health pools. Currently, as healers and their allies acquire better and better gear, the percentage of a player's health that any given heal restores increases significantly. As a result, healers are able to refill health bars so fast that we have to make damage more and more “bursty” in order to challenge them. Ideally, we want players to spend some time below full health without having healers feel like the players they're responsible for are in danger of dying at any moment. We also think that healer gameplay would be more varied, interesting, and skillful if your allies spent more time between 0% and 100%, rather than just getting damaged quickly to low health, forcing the healer to then scramble to get them back to 100% as quickly as possible.To that end, we're buffing heals less than we're increasing creature damage. Parola Sacra: Serenitàs will be deliberately less potent compared to health pools than before the item squish. Additionally, as gear improves, the scaling rates of health and healing will now be very similar, so the relative power of any given healing spell shouldn't climb so much over the course of this expansion. For those concerned about what this means for raiding, don't worry—we're taking all of these changes into account when designing Raid content for Warlords of Draenor.

It's also important to note that spells that heal based on a percentage of maximum health are being effectively buffed by the massive increase to player health pools, so we're lowering those percentages to offset the effect. That may make them appear to have been nerfed—however, the net result is that those percentage-based heals stay about the same as before relative to other heals.

All of these changes apply to damage-absorption shields as well. Additionally, we're toning down the power of absorbs in general. When they get too strong, absorption effects are often used in place of direct healing instead of as a way to supplement it. We will, of course, take these changes into account when tuning specializations that rely heavily on absorbs, such as Discipline Priests.

We also took a look at healing spells that were passive or auto-targeted (so-called "smart" heals). We want healers to care about who they're targeting and which heals they're using, because that makes healer gameplay more interactive and fun. To that end, we're reducing the healing of many passive and auto-targeted heals, and making smart heals a little less smart. Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets, of course. Another of our goals for healing in this expansion is to strike a better balance between single-target and multi-target healing spells. We've taken a close look at the mana efficiency of our multi-target heals, and in many cases, we're reducing their efficiency, usually by reducing the amount they heal. Sometimes, but more rarely, raising their mana cost was a better decision. We want players to use multi-target heals, but they should only be better than their single-target equivalents when they heal more than two players without any overhealing. This way, players will face an interesting choice between whether to use a single-target heal or a multi-target heal based on the situation.

Finally, we're removing the low-throughput, low-mana-cost heals like , , Parola Sacra: Serenità, and , because we think that while they do add complexity, they don't truly add depth to healing gameplay. (We're also renaming some spells to re-use those names. For example, Ondata di Cura is being redubbed .) However, we still want healers to think about their mana when deciding which heal to cast, and so the mana costs and throughputs of many spells are being altered to give players a choice between spells with lower throughput and lower cost versus spells with higher throughput and higher costs. Here are some examples from each healer class:Druid Higher Efficiency:Tocco Curativo, Rinvigorimento, EfflorescenzaDruid Higher Throughput:Ricrescita, Crescita Rigogliosa

Shaman Higher Efficiency:, Marea Benefica, Pioggia CurativaShaman Higher Throughput:Eruzione Benefica, Catena di GuarigioneAll of this discussion of efficiency may cause most healers to start worrying about mana regeneration and their mana pool. To allay those concerns, we've increased base mana regen a great deal at early gear levels, while having it scale up less at later gear levels. This will make all of these changes play well even in early content such as Heroic Dungeons and the first tier of Raid content, and also play well in the final Raid tier without mana and efficiency becoming irrelevant due to extremely high regeneration values.

That's a lot of big changes for healers: reduced throughput, more triage, less powerful “smart” heals, weaker absorbs, fewer spells, and a new focus on efficiency decisions. We're confident that we can apply lessons learned from previous expansions to make this the best healer experience yet: more dynamic, engaging, non-punishing, and frankly a lot more fun.

Instant-Cast Heals

Over time, healers have gained a bigger and bigger arsenal of heals that they can cast while on the move, which removes the inherent cost that movement is intended to have for them, while also limiting players' ability to counter healing in PvP. This left silences and crowd control (which we're trying to curb—see "Pruning the Garden of War") as the only ways to actually limit an enemy player's healing output. We're still preserving the option to instantly heal, but are reducing the number of instant-cast healing abilities overall. Here are some examples:Druido

Commenti

Commento di atomicwolf22

Hmm so does the healing change effect the Hybrid classes that heal themselves after or during combat?

They keep saying healers so I wondering how this effects Rets and Prot. Paladins that throw heals on themselves and others.

Commento di Cayliax

on 2014-03-07T09:31:52-06:00

More casting. GJ Blizz (Not sarcasm this time) ;)

Commento di Aksannyi

on 2014-03-07T09:37:38-06:00

Not pleased about instant cast spells being given cast times.

Commento di ADDOriN

on 2014-03-07T09:38:26-06:00

Seems like Bliiz is really trying to bring back the balance in the game related with DMG, stats, classes and spells. I love the way the "burst" of dmg in every class is at this moment (i just like intensive gameplay) and seems like WoD will be nice.

Commento di vukovikdjvs

on 2014-03-07T09:38:56-06:00

Good %^&*

Commento di Kiyah

on 2014-03-07T09:43:21-06:00

Cast time on Wild Growth and Prayer of Mending are a surprise. Healing changes are necessary and I'll roll with them just as I've done since vanilla, but those 2 changes will feel so weird!

Commento di Jezartroz

on 2014-03-07T09:56:44-06:00

Hmm so does the healing change effect the Hybrid classes that heal themselves after or during combat?

They keep saying healers so I wondering how this effects Rets and Prot. Paladins that throw heals on themselves and others.

Exactly, what does this do to Dream of Cenarius ferals, for example? Are they being affected?

Commento di Noxychu

on 2014-03-07T09:57:06-06:00

Love all these changes except the 1.5 sec cast times for all my priestythings. D:

Commento di Niftyality

on 2014-03-07T10:05:30-06:00

Instant cast spells given cast times? Seriously? Hope there's a plan to peel back the interrupts then or healers will likely be useless. Anyone with any recollection of BC holy paladins should be able to grasp why this is a bad idea.

Commento di Harnadel

on 2014-03-07T10:32:32-06:00

Doubling our health and increasing creature damage to match it after the item squish?

I hope that they work this all out to keep everything roughly the same across the board, because this all sounds like it will be very delicate.

I don't like Change!

Commento di Rankkor

on 2014-03-07T10:36:13-06:00

wow. =/

I can't say I'm happy about any of this. Pretty much dislike almost all they said here, but I'll reserve final judgement for when I'm actually playing the game. Who knows, maybe its not as bad as it sounds to me.

Commento di Quatin

on 2014-03-07T10:46:55-06:00

I hate most of the PvE stuff the only good things are more creature damage and less self heal, everything else sucks!And yeah I know that at the moment in MoP healers ain't needed, if the tank doesn't totally suck! In the beginning of MoP I were full on holy for dungeons, but as the patches came out there were less need for me, so I went shadow and still que'd as a healer because the only thing that was needed to heal was a renew, and if it should get out of hand a Vamparic embrace would do the job. so to be totally honest I'd like creatures to have more damage, players to have less self heal and the good old heals that I've grown to love! I really hope the WoD wont f*** it up as bad as MoP!

Commento di leerjawise

on 2014-03-07T11:02:23-06:00

Most of this seems like it will be okay, if not an improvement, however, taking away our instant heals?

Last thing I want to do is go back to the BC/Vanilla holy paladin, where you are constantly immobile casting holy light, essentially making you a glorified totem. I like to be able to move around while I heal. Especially with the case of eternal flame and light of dawn, which require building up of holy power to cast, so it is not like we are going to be spamming them.

And please, please, please, stop trying to adjust PVE to benefit PVP. I don't care about PVP, so it is always a kick in the pants to get nerfed based on something that is irrelevant to me.

Commento di oliviadgrace

on 2014-03-07T11:08:21-06:00

Instant cast spells given cast times? Seriously? Hope there's a plan to peel back the interrupts then or healers will likely be useless. Anyone with any recollection of BC holy paladins should be able to grasp why this is a bad idea.

There is, yes, and the removal of a lot of silence effects, if you check out the previous Watercooler a lot of these are detailed.

Commento di Siegfrid

on 2014-03-07T11:10:17-06:00

Oh god, back to only holy shock istant....

Commento di healdeez

on 2014-03-07T11:21:47-06:00

I've been rolling H pal since Wrath popped, so I've seen my class almost remade from the ground up... These changes sound amazing to me. At this point, I feel like healing is easy (at least for my class) and I'm kind of starting to get bored with it. Granted, I'm not happy about 2 of my best heals having cast times now, but that's just because i love the numbers they put up on recount, and I'm a lazy guy, so i can definitely live with "easy". It sounds like I might actually have to pay a LITTLE attention to what's going on in the raid, and which player I should be healing and when for the new expansion, and to be honest I couldn't be happier. Actual raiding sounds so much more fun than just hanging out spamming the same aoe heals over and over again(all while taking 2 steps to the left to move out of some fire) and I can't wait to have to put some effort into playing my class/role well. So far, so good Blizz.

Commento di Taenamyr

on 2014-03-07T11:33:35-06:00

So healing is too OP in PVP so we are going to nerf it... don't worry we will tune raid bosses down to make sure healers are ok...

Why not just ditch PVP and stop nerfing every class and spell to balance it because you are negatively effecting PVE with all these changes.

---

As a disc priest I see - You are getting Holy Nova back.... but we are nerfing smart heals and bubbles... Hopefully they don't break us as badly as they did at the start of Cata. Disc priests are about mitigating and damage prevention. Most of our abilites we use are bubbles or smart heals, because that is fun and what makes our spec different from the other big, bursty healers. Paladins have this as well, but to a lesser extent than disc. I know they said they would take that into account for classes like Disc who rely on absorbs, and I hope they find a way to fine tune this without going back to the days where you get kicked from a random heroic before it even starts because of your spec that we had in Cataclysm.

Commento di Niftyality

on 2014-03-07T11:42:04-06:00

Instant cast spells given cast times? Seriously? Hope there's a plan to peel back the interrupts then or healers will likely be useless. Anyone with any recollection of BC holy paladins should be able to grasp why this is a bad idea.

There is, yes, and the removal of a lot of silence effects, if you check out the previous Watercooler a lot of these are detailed.

Removing silences from interrupts and reducing the number of interrupt mechanics in the game isn't the same thing.

Almost every spec/class in the game has an interrupt, and now we're looking at all but 1 spell having a cast time, and the one that doesn't has a cooldown. For holy paladins, getting silenced by an interrupt doesn't matter because we only have one spell school. Often, the silence mechanic lasts less time than the interrupt lockout does.

Silences aren't what concern me. Silences can be managed. Getting kicked/pummeled/wind sheared/rebuked/mind frozen/skull bashed/counter shot/spear hand striked does. Most of these abilities have lockouts that are 20-25% of their cooldown duration, so if we're now forced to hard cast virtually everything in our toolkit, we're going to spend more time locked out than casting.

Commento di Aerozia

on 2014-03-07T11:52:56-06:00

if you are a ret pally, outside of WoG or eternal flame, you should have no healing spells. same for boomies, eles enhance ect

Commento di Celestri

on 2014-03-07T12:00:50-06:00

I like the idea of getting rid of the spike damage in PVE.... it was exhausting to have to watch player health pools and wait for someone to get spiked to 40% and have to get them back up... it'd be nice to see your raid at less than 100% and know that someone isn't going to get 2 shotted.